First off, there are servers in serverless computing. However, the construct of servers is a throwback to a time when the only way to develop distributed applications was to focus on the server as the base component of the infrastructure. In the server-centric model of distributed systems, developers needed to understand their CPU, Memory and OS requirements.

I’ve worked enterprise IT for far too long to fall into the “privacy at work is king” camp. If you use your organization's resources, then you may give up the right to privacy at work. I’ve implemented data loss protection (DLP) software for a 12,000-user U.S. Federal agency. Users don’t like it. It impacts system performance, and automatic encryption of removable devices makes data sharing more difficult. However, the worse scenario is having an Equifax like headline hit the news. Such breaches are why encryption breaking technology for snooping on employees remains interesting.

is a business upon itself. The larger the team, the larger the effort to coordinate the efforts within and between organizational units. When an organization talks about flattening the org chart, it's a result of out of control overhead. Computers systems are not immune from this impact.

Google's Kelsey Hightower joins the podcast for a reality check for enterprise IT. Keith and Mark ask the question, "Can enterprises adapt" to the quickly changing technology landscape? Do organizations have the budget and aptitude for navigating the disruption. Kelsey gives a pretty blunt assessment. Kelsey claims debates around issues such as CI/CD are now over. Kelsey shares his vision of the relation containers, the cloud, and business value.

The Equifax hack raised a basic question. Don’t most Fortune 500 companies have some type of data loss protection (DLP) system in place to prevent such breaches. Or at least identify the breach before too much damage is done? You’d think that is the case after high-profile consumer data hacks such as Target occurred. The technologies to identify these intrusions remains ample. The operations discipline to utilize them remains immature. Next up on our Tech Field Day 15 previews is network virtualization and security company Ixia.

The Tech Field Day (TFD) presenter up next in my series of TFD 15 previews is DataCore. DataCore is a virtual SAN or hyperconverged solution. You may ask, why do we need yet another software-defined storage solution. VMware has come out with VSAN, aren’t we done? The simple fact is that there’s going to be opportunities for virtual SAN companies as long as there’s performance to be eked out of the underlying storage infrastructure. Or there are cost savings.

We’ve heard the term zero-trust before. VMware has used it to describe the micro-segmentation that’s done using NSX. The idea in network micro-segmentation assumes no trust between systems based on location within the physical or logical network. Skyport Systems takes the concept to the extreme. In Skyports architecture, the network, application, computing, and user have no shared level of trust, other than zero-trust.

Secondary data has seen a boom in investment. Cohesity, Rubrik, and Druva have all each seen recent investments of $80M or more. Either there’s incredible product demand or investors are drunk on the market segment. TFD15 is an opportunity for Actifio to share its updated strategy after a few years of lessons learned.

Scale Computing is now a seasoned veteran at presenting to the TFD audience. However, this is a new market for the company. Presenters will need to talk beyond speeds and feeds. Unlike competitors such as Nutanix, Scale Computing doesn’t offer support for the VMware ecosystem.

I've talked about VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS for a few weeks since the GA release during VMworld 2017. The solution is unique in that Amazon doesn't modify its data center design for any partner. VMC on AWS required the two companies to work together to make two very different data center designs work. The solution raises the question around lift and shift as a cloud migration strategy.

The hotel industry represents an entire vertical integration of technology and the consumer experience. However, Airbnb is in the process of disrupting the entire industry. Digital transformation is only part of the equation.

We had Intel on the CTO Advisor Podcast discussing Optane Storage and what it means to the data center and applications. During TechField Day Extra at VMworld 2017, we were reminded the physical memory technology is only as good as the protocols carrying the data. Kingston memory presented their vision for NVMe based SSD along side startup Liqid.

The NSX team was describing how application flows over the virtual network. The team described the interchanges within the hypervisor. The interchange system was called a switch. While not new, the concept threw me for a curve.

Coming off of DellEMC World, HPE Discover and Interop, I'm convinced that legacy IT infrastructure companies need a reset. Today, AWS and Google are having conversations directly with the consumers of technology. It's ironic that the theme of digital transformation is to remove friction in a business relationship. Shopping online is disrupts brick and mortar because online shopping removes friction.

Are all Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) solutions alike? With over 40 vendors in this space, I’d say that it’s likely not. Talking with The PacketPushers’ Greg Ferro on Twitter, he believes that many of these vendors will survive. While the space is fragmented, Ferro believes there’s room enough and market opportunity for most of the existing players to make a going concern of the SD-WAN business. It’s the question, of what makes one SD-WAN vendor different from another that I approach the follow-up to the TELoIP presentation at Network Field Day 15 (NFD15).